In this impressive new collection, Joan Carole Hand offers her reader a deeply realized and convincing inventory of family and relationship, rooted in the rich soil of the poet's own life and aspirations. The speaker in these poems directly addresses specific individuals in Hand's life - principally but not exclusively family members - a subject she approaches with candor and directness of gaze, by turns curious, tender, indomitable. As readers, we are invited to dive deep into her unflinching observations, with the fierce confidence of the author herself, as would one asked to swim along with this well-conditioned swimmer, capable of 'penetrating the highest of high tides, swimming against every current, and testing the invisibility of the fishes.' The urge to stay with her, stroke by stroke, is a strong one; the portraits emerge, iconic as the boulder she spies at the edge of the shore in one of her poems, surfacing and resurfacing with the tide - an 'anchor and a strength' in a turbulent shoreline. There is a truth in these poems - at once unapproachable, mesmerizing, inescapable - to which we are all ultimately subject. And there is a reverence in these poems, tempered with both a longing to find passage across the distance between writer and subject and an acknowledgment of the forces keeping that from being possible. Ultimately, we are rewarded with an enduring sense of the inexpressible covalences of the heart, the eloquent push-pull of separation and connection, and the overwhelming fullness of our having experienced what is truly intimate in intimate relations.
-George Wallace, former writer-inresidence at the Walt Whitman Birthplace, poet laureate of Suffolk County, NY.
John Berryman once told me that when he sent one of his last pre-publication manuscripts to Richard Wilbur, Wilbur replied kindly but said that John's poems could use more 'voltage.' Reading J.C. Hand's poetry, I keep thinking that she has the requisite voltage, the electrical gists and piths that keep my eye and mind moving with her voice down the page in jolts of strobe light. Consider a poem, in East of July (2004), each of whose five sections begins 'You raped me in Dubrovnik.' I've it read many times and have felt I've needed a surge-protector. Over the decades, after believing she has not belonged to herself, she has sometimes been defiled, but she has been determined not to be diminished into one of those 'lady writers / active in the garden club / used to rhyming posies / with rosies / penning light verse / into spiral notebooks.' With a kind of ferocious need, she has moved psychically from the home she felt to be her husband's only to a house (or houses) that in fact and in poetry are now hers and to restore her to herself in time (the quotidian) and Time (spiritual eternity or at least depths within present being). In this new and riveting collection, Mommy, the places of her life and family are restored for her and her reader within 'a reverent kind of distance' ('A Summer Offering'). By way of both her interfused themes and the intensity of her saying, J.C. Hand is a sometimes shocking, often consoling, but always memorable poet. Emily Dickinson and Anne Sexton welcome her into their sisterhood.
-William Heyen, Ph.D., professor of English/poet-in-residence emeritus at The College at Brockport.
What strikes me is the way (J.C. Hand) has made the words just flow so smoothly. It really is masterful. ... I can just picture (her) dancing and (her) imaginary leaps into the heights, even the sky.
-Rabbi Adam D. Fisher, poet
